Before making decision, regulators must read thousands of comments

Associated Press

Published 11:19 pm, Friday, January 18, 2013

ALBANY — State regulations make for pretty dull reading, but you'd never know it from the mountains of cardboard boxes of public comments generated by the latest gas-drilling guidelines proposed by New York's environmental agency.

Many of the 204,000 letters anti-drilling groups say they submitted are the result of social media outreach and community meetings where organizers handed out form letters and stamped envelopes.

Environmental groups say the volume of comments demonstrates the intensity of sentiment against natural gas development, but the industry dismisses it as a misrepresentation of actual sentiment and a tactic to stall development. It demonstrates the grass-roots organizing power of the anti-gas drilling movement in New York, where high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, hasn't even begun.

A statewide network of hundreds of anti-drilling groups revved up the effort shortly after the Department of Environmental Conservation posted updated regulations online at the end of November. When the public comment period ended Jan. 11, a coalition of groups called New Yorkers Against Fracking announced it had presented 204,000 comments to the agency.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the DEC are expected to decide soon whether to lift a 4½-year-old moratorium on fracking, which has made vast quantities of natural gas accessible to drillers who use the technology to crack gas-rich rock about a mile underground in the Marcellus Shale, which underlies southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Thousands of wells have been drilled and fracked in the other Marcellus states in the U.S.

The DEC has a Feb. 27 deadline to finalize new regulations or start new rules from scratch. Before then, regulators have to read all the public comments and respond to substantive issues raised.

The agency received what it termed an "unprecedented" 66,000 comments on the earlier version of the regulations and the 1,500-page environmental impact study they were based on, and took most of 2012 to read, categorize and respond to them.

DEC spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said the department has 30 to 40 employees at its Albany offices going through comments, most of which are form letters. DEC is still counting the comments and as of Thursday had nearly 120,000.

Drilling companies, industry groups and pro-gas landowner coalitions have also submitted comments, some of them criticizing certain requirements as too restrictive.